NOTE: this blog is no longer active as of 12/07. New one: http://blog.kirchhof.com
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Mon, 31 Jan 2005
Heh...
My buddy Frank sends along the International Symbol For Marriage.
Posted at 11:49 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink]
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Sat, 29 Jan 2005
Brrr
Be glad that you didn't park your car by the lake in Geneva this week.
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Posted at 11:08 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink]
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Tue, 25 Jan 2005
Coming Home To Roost
The Financial Times reports that the unthinkable is happening:
Central banks are shifting reserves away from the US and towards the
eurozone in a move that looks set to deepen the Bush administration's
difficulties in financing its ballooning current account deficit.
In actions likely to undermine the dollar's value on currency markets,
70 per cent of central bank reserve managers said they had increased
their exposure to the euro over the past two years. The majority
thought eurozone money and debt markets were as attractive a
destination for investment as the US.
The findings emerge from a survey of central bank reserve managers
published today and conducted between September and December of last
year. About 65 central banks, controlling assets worth $1,700bn, took
part and the results showed a marked change in attitude over the past
two years.
Any rebalancing of central bank reserve portfolios has serious
implications for the global financial system as the US has become
increasingly dependent on official flows of funds to finance its
current account deficit, estimated at $650bn in 2004.
Posted at 08:43 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink]
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Mon, 24 Jan 2005
Pulitzer Material
There's more truth in this picture than can be adequately described
in words...
Posted at 17:48 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink]
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Thu, 20 Jan 2005
There Is No Crisis
Check out ThereIsNoCrisis.com for
ammo in the upcoming insanity from the Bush administration. I've added
a link at the bottom of the side bar as well.
Posted at 16:39 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink]
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Wed, 19 Jan 2005
Kerry Votes No On Rice Nomination
"Dr. Rice is a principal architect, implementer, and defender of a
series of Administration policies that have not made our country as
secure as we should be and have alienated much-needed allies in our
common cause of winning the war against terrorism. Regrettably, I did
not see in Dr. Rice's testimony any acknowledgment of the need to
change course or of a new vision for America's role in the world."
Sure would've been nice to hear those sentiments during the campaign.
Posted at 14:10 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink]
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The Coming Wars
Seymour Hersh is very good at what he does. Which is why his latest article in the New Yorker is so scary.
George W. Bushs reelection was not his only victory last fall. The
President and his national-security advisers have consolidated control
over the military and intelligence communities' strategic analyses and
covert operations to a degree unmatched since the rise of the
post-Second World War national-security state. Bush has an aggressive
and ambitious agenda for using that control against the mullahs in Iran
and against targets in the ongoing war on terrorism during his second
term. The C.I.A. will continue to be downgraded, and the agency will
increasingly serve, as one government consultant with close ties to
the Pentagon put it, as facilitators of policy emanating from
President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. This process is well
under way.
Brave New World. Read the article...
Posted at 13:42 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink]
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Fri, 14 Jan 2005
Tonight's The Night
Way
back in November, I posted a review of a band called Back Porch Mary. They're
playing at Hanovers
tonight, I am mixing the show, and it is going to be a great
night. Make every effort to come out and see 'em. Ameritrash opens
(BPM's former drummer's band) at 9:30 or so; BPM is on at 11:00 PM.
Highly recommended.
Posted at 16:32 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink]
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Thu, 13 Jan 2005
Movement Of Jah People
Rita is wanting to exhume
Bob and take him over to Shashemene, Ethiopia.
Posted at 11:00 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink]
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In Other News...
Aleister Crowley's
old bed is to be exorcised.
I wonder where Jimmy Page is at
the moment... probably backmasking lyrics about it somewhere... heh...
Posted at 15:30 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink]
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A Record Company That Gets It
Via Boing Boing, an entry about Artists House, a new (and I mean new) record company. From their web site:
The Artists House Difference
The Components of our Presentation:
- A CD (encoded with mp3s of all songs)
- A free DVD, containing - 24 bit/96k stereo mix
- Dolby Digital Surround Sound mix (with session footage throughout)
- A documentary on how the recording was made
- Interviews
- Music lesson
- Artists commentary throughout the music
- Printable music from a PC
- Producer comments
- Links
Artists House is a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit music company dedicated to artists and listeners. We want to give our customers more value for their money and we want to give our artists other ways of communicating with their audience. We try to make our presentations entertaining and informative. We want to bring the listener into the process, to show how the recording was made. Here's how our CD and DVD work.
One of the most extraordinary features is the 24 bit/96k stereo mix. CD is 16 bit/44.1k so 24bit/96 k is a huge improvement. You should notice a difference. In fact, this may be the first time you've ever heard stereo sound this good, unless you've been listening to a lot of LPs lately. The technical specifications of the DVD did not allow us to use video with this "high resolution" audio, so we just put a photograph on the screen.
If you click on "play surround" you'll get Dolby Digital Surround Sound and you'll see a montage of session footage, photographs, and sheet music. If you don't have a surround sound receiver, and you click on this menu selection, you'll just hear stereo as you see the montage video footage.
There is also several hours of video footage showing the process of making the recording. When we could, we filmed music lessons with the artist. Oteil gives a 40 minute bass lesson, Jason gives a violin lesson, and Bob Brookmeyer gives a philosophy of music lesson.
We have interview footage with all the players on our recordings but even the DVD 9 (9 Gigabytes) wouldn't hold it. We also have scrapbooks of photographs taken at the session that are narrated by the artists, and they're funny! But no room. But there was room for an artist's commentary throughout the entire recording. This is like the director's commentary in DVD movies. The idea is for the artist to play you his new recording as if you were his best friend and he was telling you about it as it plays. (You'll find some of these interviews and scrapbooks on this website.)
One other thing that is interesting is the "hybrid" portion of the DVD. You can put the DVD in your DVD ROM drive in your PC and you can print out the music and lyrics for all of the songs on the CD. If a song is "controlled" by someone other than the artist it will probably not be available since publishers don't generally like to "give away" music. We give it away because we think you should have it.
We are encoding our CDs with mp3s and we would like for you to email them to your friends. They are properly encoded and labeled and they are tagged with our website. We want to embrace this technology, not fight it. If you send us an email and give us the addresses of those to whom you send the mp3s, we'll mail them stuff about the artists from time to time.
These are the people who will be making money (for their nonprofit
corporation -- and moreso, the artists) while the Big
Five die their highly entertaining and protracted death. Very
refreshing.
Posted at 10:37 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink]
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Tue, 11 Jan 2005
Charged
I was doing some research on modular synthesizers when I ran across
a wholly unrelated video. Here's the page, and here's the video link.
The video was taken at Eldorado Substation in Boulder City, NV. The file is called
Lugo because this switch and shunt reactor are on the line that goes to Lugo. This
one is clearly a 500KV (I can tell by the size) three-phase switch, probably rated at
about 2000 amps of normal current carrying capability. 500 KV refers to the phase-
to-phase voltage. Divide by 1.732 to get the phase-to-ground voltage (289 KV).
Wow. Big Wow.
Posted at 14:51 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink]
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Ch-ch-ch-ch Changes
From NASA (via a Slashdot entry):
NASA scientists using data from the Indonesian earthquake calculated it affected Earth's rotation, decreased the length of day, slightly changed the planet's shape, and shifted the North Pole by centimeters. The earthquake that created the huge tsunami also changed the Earth's rotation.
Dr. Richard Gross of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., and Dr. Benjamin Fong Chao, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., said all earthquakes have some affect on Earth's rotation. It's just they are usually barely noticeable.
"Any worldly event that involves the movement of mass affects the Earth's rotation, from seasonal weather down to driving a car," Chao said.
Gross and Chao have been routinely calculating earthquakes' effects in changing the Earth's rotation in both length-of- day as well as changes in Earth's gravitational field. They also study changes in polar motion that is shifting the North Pole. The "mean North pole" was shifted by about 2.5 centimeters (1 inch) in the direction of 145 degrees East Longitude. This shift east is continuing a long-term seismic trend identified in previous studies.
They also found the earthquake decreased the length of day by 2.68 microseconds. Physically this is like a spinning skater drawing arms closer to the body resulting in a faster spin. The quake also affected the Earth's shape. They found Earth's oblateness (flattening on the top and bulging at the equator) decreased by a small amount. It decreased about one part in 10 billion, continuing the trend of earthquakes making Earth less oblate.
Posted at 14:31 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink]
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Strange Times
IBM used to be the evil empire back in the Old Days™. How times have changed. Ars tells us today in an article:
In a bit of a turnabout from the usual "hands off my patents" stance of most companies, IBM will allow open-source developers to use 500 of their software patents with plans to open up more of their patent portfolio in the future (leaving another 9,500 IBM software patents off-limits). Other Linux vendors have made similar moves, with Red Hat allowing complete access to its patent portfolio for open-source developers and Novell planning to deploy its own portfolio against the possibility of legal attacks on open-source software.
As patent-related litigation becomes more widespread, the possibility of attacks on Linux and other open-source software by competitors is growing. An audit conducted last year by Open Source Risk Management turned up 283 potential patent infringements in the Linux 2.4 and 2.6 code base. Of those 283, 60 are from IBM, 27 come from Microsoft, and an additional 20 are owned by HP. Some analysts believe that it is only a matter of time before Linux is assaulted with patent infringement lawsuits by one of its competitors.
The patents IBM is releasing for open-source use are wide ranging, applicable to areas such as database and OS interoperability, language processing, linking OS processes dynamically, and user interfaces. There are also plans to release patents for use in developing open standards, which will make wide-spread adoption of new standards more likely. Such an approach will likely pay dividends if Microsoft's troubles with getting Sender ID ratified are any indication.
Very cool.
Posted at 14:26 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink]
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Thu, 06 Jan 2005
Social Security
Okay all of you investors. Which is the better investment: the
stock market or Social Security? CSM does the math:
For 45 years, the defense-industry analyst paid into the system until his retirement in 1994. But with all the recent hoopla over reform, Mr. Logue, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate, decided to go back and check his own records. Would he have done better investing his money than the bureaucrats at the Social Security Administration?
He recorded all the payroll taxes he paid into the system (including the matching amount from his employer), tracked down the return the Social Security Trust Fund earned for each of the 45 years, and then compared the result with what he would have gotten had he been able to invest the same amount of payroll tax money over the same period in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (including dividends).
To his surprise, the Social Security investment won out: $261,372 versus $255,499, a difference of $5,873.
So. Let's recap. There is no
Social Security crisis. There is
no Social Security crisis. There is
no Social Security crisis.
Karl Rove's point man on the issue thinks that killing Social
Security is "one of the
most important conservative undertakings of modern times" and "a
battle over Social Security is winnable for the first time in six
decades and could transform the political landscape." If they are so
concerned about "saving" Social Security, then why is it a "battle"
that is "winnable for the first time in six decades?" And why are they
spending 50
to 100 million on a propaganda campaign?
Hey, it worked with Iraq.
And meanwhile, Social Security is a better investment than blue chip stocks, at least in some cases.
Got it?
Posted at 14:21 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink]
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Tue, 04 Jan 2005
An Honest Politician
I had the pleasure of meeting Dennis Kucinich last year. He seemed
to me to be a rare creature: a genuinely committed compassionate man,
almost completely lacking in guile, and fully aware of the shark tank
that he'd decided to play in.
He has a weblog these days, and in an interesting post he ruminates
on the value of his presidential run and many other
things. Recommended.
Posted at 12:36 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink]
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Art And Crafts
Be the first on your block to crochet your own Lorenz Manifold...
Posted at 06:50 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink]
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